avatar-optimization

[urban fable]

Yeah, this

Nevermind, it support .vrm

I'm gonna make it

My computer is dying

Hm, I should blender only the .vrm right?

@buoyant holly Sorry for the ping but, "bake" is mentioned, but where can I download it ? o0

Trying to find it but, i'm maybe blind?

[buoyant holly]

https://github.com/feilen/cats-blender-plugin

[urban fable]

You are gonna kill me man but

I have the cats things, here:

But not the "bake" things, like the link you dropped to me

[normal nova]

You need to be on the dev version for that

(until the release which is like... this week, some time)

@urban fable

There's a button that grabs the dev version in... I think the settings

[urban fable]

Oh, thanks !

Yeah ok, It's not gonna be easy :DDD

Why cant just thing work like, wow xD

[normal nova]

weird

https://github.com/GiveMeAllYourCats/cats-blender-plugin/tree/development < if you go to 'Code' -> 'Download Zip' it's the same thing, just have to install it and make sure it doesn't conflict with the existing one

[urban fable]

OK IT WORK

Hm

unless

Ok nvm found it, how great is google today

Mayber, after 7 hours of tryharding, everything will work

Same problem with eyes, why is life so sad :(, oh wait, he said that I have to cut them before, hm, but how

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I-4a1q0YLE

[urban fable]

Thanks !
Oh my, i'm gonna become a 3d engineer soon

But uh

I have to cut those things?

[normal nova]

Yeah. So, in 2d, you can draw like, the actual shape of the eyelashes you want. Then you knife project them from that view, and blender uses it to 'cut' the underlying peices, making them actual geometry

then you just delete the bits you no longer want

[urban fable]

Uh
I understand what you are explaining but, hm
I need to remove those things right?
But wont be my character without eyeleashes? xD

[normal nova]

No like, uhhh

here

[urban fable]

(I'm sorry, i'm totally new with those things ><)

[normal nova]

Say I have this plane (like your eyelashes) and this little line I've scribbled (protip, select a vert and ctrl+rightclick to extrude it instantly, so you can draw stuff quick)

Once you've got that, you can click the line, then shift-click the plane, switch to Edit mode and use Knife Project

Result, projecting from above

Then you just delete the bit you don't want

make sure they're different objects tho

And I think in blender, as long as the alpha channel is hooked up, you'll need to set Alpha Mode (in object properties) to Clip to see it properly

like this

lmk if I've lost you x3

[urban fable]

HHHHHHM

my brain is melting

There is like one thing I dont understand

My eyeslashes are black, because of the transparency, right?

So, if i like cut the transparency (Which i dont know how to recognize 0o), what will happen to the face of my avatar?

(if you dont have time its ok, guess i'm just give up at this point Damn)

[normal nova]

uhhh, you'll probably wanna separate the eyelash peices into a second object first, cut them, then join them back (select eyelashes, then body, Ctrl+J)

I'm re-baking versions of my avatar which means pressing a button and waiting, I got time x3

[normal nova]

probably scroll up a bit? Should jsut be called 'settings'

Right above the two MMD thingies

[urban fable]

Uh cant get far than this

[normal nova]

uhhh

[urban fable]

Thanks, hope i'm not too much bothering you ><

[urban fable]

Uh, I'll try

[normal nova]

well that's... new to me. Try selecting other materials?

[urban fable]

Uh, material ?

[normal nova]

Other things in the list above

the M00_etc ones

[urban fable]

for example?

oh nvm

[normal nova]

Those're vertex groups in the vertices panel, I mean in the material panel (the little red ball)

[urban fable]

yeah, found those

[normal nova]

Any settings for those? I wonder if it's a weird import thing

[normal nova]

:L

yeah that's new to me

[urban fable]

Weeeeeeell

Maybe because I used the .vrm
and not the .fbx one?

[normal nova]

Idk if that'd make a difference but worth a shot?

[urban fable]

ffs

I dont understand

XD

But .fbx have... nothing... not even a head

[normal nova]

mh, idk then

[urban fable]

Yeah its w.e, it's 6:18AM here
Need to sleep

Thanks for your help @normal nova

( @buoyant holly and also @loud frost, sorry for being a nooby :( )
Have a great day !

[normal nova]

Yeah, sorry it was a struggle x3 if it's any consolation, uploading a quest version of any kind will be better than a robot

[toxic igloo]

anyone have a go to guide / video for atlasing? I have some stuff I wanna use for VR but it's just wayyyy too many materials.

[sick timber]

Use the cats blender plug-in, it has an auto-atlaser

[calm spade]

https://youtu.be/snx7_2G5xx4

don't use the same shader as in the video though, very outdated

[toxic igloo]

ty!

[hardy bolt]

Anyone able to explain why this has suddenly snuck into my avatar build even tho im not useing anything standard unity assets ?

[woven fable]

Is 150fps alone on home world a good optimization?

(i was in front of a mirror to add that on top)

[unkempt fog]

How to check avatar file size without upload

[unkempt fog]

beautiful

[heady smelt]

what are some good quest compatible shaders ?

[unkempt fog]

@heady smelt XSToon, Silent's shaders, poiyomi's toon, UTS2
You should use it for your avatar.

[heady smelt]

is poiyomi toon quest compatible ? @unkempt fog

[unkempt fog]

Oculus quest can use only VRChat/mobile shader

https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/quest-content-limitations

[heady smelt]

ahh okay i will use VRChat/Mobile/Toon Lit then i guess

thank you

so this should be good with that shader?

@unkempt fog

[unkempt fog]

perfect

[heady smelt]

alrightyy thank you

[woven fable]

how does the distance to object in dynamic bone affect the performance

hold on. can you use animation to change the dynamic bone value?

[sweet mason]

no

[woven fable]

you can't change damping or anything?

dammit

[sweet mason]

you can turn it off/on

[woven fable]

WAIT

YOU CAN

[sweet mason]

no

[woven fable]

you can add properties but it breaks down

dammit

i wanted to alter dynamic bone depending on the speed

if i move quickly i wanted my tail to stay close behind me

but when i am stationary i wanted to be able to push my tails with my hands

and make them stay where i pushe them to

[sweet mason]

turn off your collider when over x velocity

[woven fable]

not that way

stiffness 0

but when i move with stiffness 0 i get a effect of snake tail

that is not what i desire

so stiffness must be .1

but when i stand still i want to push my tail a bit away and have it stay

or move the tail up and down making it still stay

that require stifness 0

[languid quartz]

Unless something was changed recently I don't think those dynamic bone values can be changed at runtime in VRChat.

[woven fable]

they can't saddly

although there seem to be some preparation to allow life chang in the script it self

since properties can be pulled and implemented

but the script does not update the setting life during the game

it just loads in what is.... hold on

they can be changed!!

There is a way!

[languid quartz]

In Unity or VRChat?

[woven fable]

in Unity

by animation

[languid quartz]

Oh, yeah you can. But I recall it not working in VRChat, that's why I mentioned unless something was changed recently.

[woven fable]

so i am gonna compile it and test it in unity

if it works

i found a way to get dynamic bones to change value in game

alright i will test it and send feed back as soon as i can

[languid quartz]

aight

[woven fable]

damm

it doesn't

the animation seem not to be active

wait

nvm

my sdk is old

that's why it is broken

i feel dumb

[languid quartz]

🤔

[tribal ruin]

You can however animate the dynamic bone script on and off

So if you have multiple dynamic bone components that effect the same chain of bones, with different settings, you can toggle between them

[woven fable]

is there a way to adjust the hight of name plates

i get a constant issue where my name plate is way higher then i want it to be

[fading onyx]

How hard would it be to optimize an avatar with 250k polygons? 🤔

[loud frost]

depends if its rigged, or textured... orrr if you don't mind it becoming tris instead of quads

[calm spade]

Depends on what the polys are on

[fading onyx]

Mhm

[loud frost]

theres multiple blender plugins that can optimize it

[fading onyx]

Would it be possible to bring it down to quest compatible level without completely destroying the look of it

[calm spade]

That may be asking a lot

[loud frost]

theres a paid plugin that CAN do that

[calm spade]

look would go down

[loud frost]

but 1. its paid and 2. you'd have to rig it again

[calm spade]

don't use paid plugins when cats is free

[loud frost]

not quite worth it

[fading onyx]

It has toggleable clothes and stuff, would that affect polygon count

[calm spade]

https://twitter.com/feilen/status/1332437394260312065

♡ Feilen (@feilen)

Mentioned before but, my 'instantly produce an optimized Quest avatar' changes for the CATS blender plugin now are in the dev version if you wanna try them out! May have some issues w/ blender 2.9x, still testing

Twitter · Nov 27, 2020, 9:33 PM

if it has toggles, it'll most likely need to be redone for quest regardless

[fading onyx]

Mhm

[loud frost]

its ok for the poly count to be a little higher if you have proper 3.0 toggles that toggle the mesh renderer itself

[fading onyx]

Rough

[loud frost]

as then you're not adding any lag

[calm spade]

Mobile platform

[harsh silo]

Does model fbx file size affect performance? it has a 50k poly count and 7 materials but the size of the file increased after i exported it

it does not have alot of bones or unused bones either

[solid smelt]

Bloated file size can be caused by corrupted blendshapes so you can check them for that. Otherwise, file size doesn't really effect performance, but will cause a greater hitch when loaded in and take longer to load.

[harsh silo]

hmm ok

[jovial grail]

some shaders can also increase file size

[amber hemlock]

You can usually drop a model down to about a fourth of tris without visually differing too much. Even more if it was already way more complex than it needed to be.

However you’ll need to actually optimize it yourself, instead of just decimating it, if you want good results

And if the model was already super optimized and still over the quest limits there’s not much you can do

[normal nova]

If the toggles are just different shape keys, the bake changes preserve shape keys now

https://github.com/GiveMeAllYourCats/cats-blender-plugin/wiki/Bake < here's a more detailed overview of the bake thingything, it's in the dev version of cats for now

[normal nova]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/GiveMeAllYourCats/cats-blender-plugin/images/bake-scene.png some results of baking my obscenely complicated node setup @34k polys down to 5k polys, one material, one mesh

Note: it also has presets for making Desktop avatars, and works with any PBR shader (standard, rero, etc) or anything that uses subsets of it (toon shaders)

[uncut apex]

... okay so how exactly do i make an avatar both pc and quest compatible? Ive made a low poly model for quest, uploaded it, then copied its ID and pasted it into the pc versions pipeline manager. It says on vr chat that its compatible for both, but all quest users I've met say they cant see it. is there something i'm missing??? The only thing I can think of is i have 2 separate models in the same project because I needed to copy and paste the lipsync and stuff onto the low-poly model. maybe having 2 conflict in some way? idk

[leaden hamlet]

what do they say when they cant see it? does it show one of the default avatars with the avatar thumbnail on the chest. or does it say perf blocked on the chest. if its the second one then your avatar is very poor and will be blocked by default.

[sweet mason]

[elder plover]

Ensure you have Android Build Support enabled
if you're certain you do, make a copy of the project, then open up the vrc sdk window, and you should see an option for Switch Build Target to Android
https://i.imgur.com/2ZWzriB.png
click that and give it a few minutes, then resolve any issues - in my case, that'd be shaders
build and upload it, and it should be available for quest

or, actually, ignore me, because I didn't pay attention to what you've done >_>

[amber hemlock]

What was it rated when you uploaded it for quest?

Also on the avatar selection screen in game, is both the green and blue circles lit up?

[vital pier]

also quest can't have avatars over 10MB in download size, adding less props for quest is recommended and removing assets in unity that are not being used for the quest version like shaders in the asset folder

[jovial grail]

why would they be packed with the avatar if they're unused

[leaden hamlet]

yeah they shouldnt be packed

afaik the only things that get packed are everything immediately connected to the model that the descriptor is on. and its dependencies.

worlds include everything in the hierarchy. (although im not 100% sure about that one)

[jovial grail]

it builds a bundle

basically just create a prefab out of your avatar and right click export it

should basically be that except scripts

[uncut apex]

It is excellent quality

[amber hemlock]

Interesting. The only other possibility is that it’s over the 10mb limit so it will never be rendered. For whatever reason the rating system ignores file size

[uncut apex]

Hm, alright I’ll check the file size and see if that’s the problem

[amber hemlock]

If it is, textures are usually the issue pushing it over. Or lack of legacy blend shapes

[uncut apex]

How can I fix that? Like how can I make the textures optimized or whatever

[normal nova]

Generally for textures, just make sure they're all 1024x1024

Or if you don't wanna change the texture size, enable crunch compression on them

Unity has built-in scaling if you change the 'max image size' slider

[iron patio]

any tutorials out there for optimizing pc avatars to quest out there?
that go into decimation, atlasing, shape key preservation, script removal, dynamic bone removal, fbx import and export and preserve prefab etc

[calm spade]

half the things you listed take place of two different softwares

https://twitter.com/feilen/status/1332437394260312065

♡ Feilen (@feilen)

Mentioned before but, my 'instantly produce an optimized Quest avatar' changes for the CATS blender plugin now are in the dev version if you wanna try them out! May have some issues w/ blender 2.9x, still testing

Twitter · Nov 27, 2020, 9:33 PM

Try this for the first part

the other part you can do manually or use Pumkin's tool

[iron patio]

cool thanks

[snow geode]

Decimation 🤢

Edge dissolve 😩

[iron patio]

why does my prefab have textures nicely applied but my fbx doesn't

[uncut apex]

does just the quest version of an avatar need to be below 10mb or does the pc version have to be as well

[jovial grail]

just the quest

[amber hemlock]

Your fbx did not have the materials applied and the prefab variant added them. Avoid this because the original blank materials are still being downloaded

[normal nova]

hm, that's a point actually

My script exports a model with a single material applied, but expects you to create a new material before uploading (cause the fbx import doesn't get all passes)

Probably just wanna have an empty material slot instead? So the materials don't get packed in

Or.. suppose I could just disable the material export option :v

Yep, that did it

Currently my model on Desktop only takes up 8MB download size, but it could always be smaller...

[amber hemlock]

Disabling Material import is the same as remapping them in my experience

Both avoid packing in useless materials

I just go overkill, I remap them and then also disable import when done, which for some reason keeps the FBX as defaulting to my custom materials even when dragging in a new instance of the FBX

(And makes the thumbnail image on the FBX look nice)

[normal nova]

Yeah, avoiding having it on export in the first place would also solve that (and not rely on user interaction) so I'll do that for the bake panel

Can you think of anything else that tends to get packed in that's not generally used?

(since with the bake panel it'll apply to anything that comes out of it, it's worth getting it right)

[normal nova]

@amber hemlock I'm not sure if that's something that's been fixed, but turning off import materials (and I definitely had a default material attached) had no impact on the file size

[normal nova]

Never optimizing/making a quest version 🤢
Optimizing cause it's just a single button press now

(though yeah, if you have the time/skills, making a quest version manually and hand-indexing your materials will be generally higher quality, I'm just trying to get it as close as possible)

[tender latch]

not sure if this is the right place but whats Cats? like can somebody give me a run down of what it does and if i should get it?

nvm i think i got it

well wait how exactly do you add the plugin in

[misty star]

you can google how to install a blender addon 😏

[tender latch]

it shows as a folder and i gotta choose between some things inside

[misty star]

Unity question here:

Say you have two material slots because you want to use a sprite mask on an area when clothes are turned on. Is that counting as two materials when you have both slots occupied by the same material or does it act as normal? I don't want to accidentally create a monster that's using 5x as many draw calls as it needs to

[normal nova]

If they're the same material why would you need two slots?

[gritty niche]

ok so i am trying to optimize my avatar's horns to follow the head when i use a dance, and I found a code but i need help understanding it

[calm spade]

A code ?

[gritty niche]

yeah a computer code aka a script

[jovial grail]

can't use scripts in vrchat

[gritty niche]

oh

[jovial grail]

why aren't your horns attached to the head

[gritty niche]

they are they just wont stay attached when I play an animations like they just float

[calm spade]

Then they're not attached

Show your hierarchy with the bones

[gritty niche]

ok

[calm spade]

What the fuck

[gritty niche]

I know right!? its only when the animation is playing they break of and float

[calm spade]

The whole thing is fucked up

Why do you have three armatures

Why do you have three meshes named Body

[gritty niche]

....

[calm spade]

Why do you have multiple horns

[gritty niche]

ooooo

h

[calm spade]

Nothing's gonna work

You need one armature, and possibly one mesh

[gritty niche]

ok so the horns are actually two different horns with different armatures and bodies

[calm spade]

Well, remove everything that came with the horns then

[gritty niche]

Why? (im not kinding Im seriously wondering why)

like you want me to remove the horns horns or the armatures and their bodies

[calm spade]

The horns don't have bones

They're meshes

[gritty niche]

how do I wait....

[calm spade]

Remove the armatures and the body meshes they came with first

[gritty niche]

the horns disappear when the armatures get removed though

[calm spade]

Then drop the two horn meshes inside the head bone of the first armature at the top

[gritty niche]

-3- thats the actual model

[jovial grail]

take it back to blender

[gritty niche]

@Pump

@arctic yacht I dont use blender

[calm spade]

Unity can only do so much

[gritty niche]

yeah but blender is wierd

[jovial grail]

won't be able to get a good result in unity

your other meshes are attached to your hip bone

[gritty niche]

wait your saying to put the horns on the hip bone?

[calm spade]

Yeah idk who made that but it's pretty much a frankenstein mess

Don't expect anything to work

[jovial grail]

no, they're attached to it by default if they aren't attached to anything else

but you can't properly attach stuff in unity, unless you know what you're doing

and even then it's unlikely to work well

[gritty niche]

I made that mess... -3-

i didnt make the avatar though

[jovial grail]

take it to blender, attaching stuff like that isn't hard

[gritty niche]

how though

[jovial grail]

look up some tutorials

how to change clothes and add stuff should be similar

[gritty niche]

what file does blender use

[calm spade]

Fbx

[jovial grail]

follow a tutorial, any recent one should do

[gritty niche]

tnx

[sudden zodiac]

Your browser probably automatically extracted the zip file that you downloaded. You need to keep it as a zip and install that zip in Blender

[gritty niche]

Anyone know how to combine mesh?

[amber hemlock]

In blender it’s control J

In unity there’s a paid plugin to do it.. but just do it in blender it’s free

[gritty niche]

@amber hemlock i dont need that any more :P also you can just put the meshes not connected to something in the thing they would make most sense and they would follow you

[amber hemlock]

Like I said that is unoptimized

[normal nova]

https://github.com/GiveMeAllYourCats/cats-blender-plugin/releases/tag/0.18.0 it's readyyyyyyyyy

Don't have a quest model? Model isn't optimized on desktop?

• load your model up in blender
• click 'autodetect'
• click 'bake'
  Now you do!

[normal nova]

Note that having your models quest-ready is probably gonna be a big deal in a week (christmas), cause of the inevitable influx of new Quest users

[heady smelt]

when i add a picture to make it a texture it turns it into a paper file
when i add a picture to make it a texture it turns it into a paper file
how do i fix this

[jovial grail]

what's the file format

[woven fable]

Is there any downside or issue if i put 100 animations in my avatar.

As in 3.0 custom expression animaitions

[jovial grail]

Only file size, i'd imagine

Since they aren't all playing at the same time there should be no issue

[heady smelt]

hey i am stuck on my avatar creation and dont know how to continue can someone help me? would stream where i am how far i am and what i am doing i am currently trying to learn it

[supple reef]

Is there anyway for your particles to be destroyed on contact with a wall without your performance going into medium?

[swift ibex]

so im having trouble uploading my model and i know nothing about unity

my man is dark, and i think hes a bit too big

[slender hare]

Look in the top right. In the Transform box it says under scale "100 - 100 - 100"

That means your avatar is scaled up 100 times in all dimensions.

Try changing it to 1 - 1 - 1

[swift ibex]

ok so ive been doing some shuffling about and now im here

[slender hare]

But from what I see there's a lot more problems with it that I'm not proficient enough to fully help you with. Have you tried following a youtube tutorial?

Particularly the shader error message, its a quest specific thing and I dont have a quest. 😦

[swift ibex]

i have but this is quite literally my first time using unity

her is my current predicament

[slender hare]

I know the feeling. I've been pulling my hair out over this stuff for the past week. 😄

[swift ibex]

everything is good except the bones

which it has all the bones but they arent specified

[slender hare]

I think you forgot to generate the rig VRChat needs.

[swift ibex]

thing is im sure this has bones

[slender hare]

In your toon link folder, click on the grey image of toon link.

That should be your model.

And the window on the left should show 4 tabs, one of them being "rig".

[swift ibex]

ok

[slender hare]

Click on Rig, in the "animation type" drop down select "humanoid"

And click apply

[swift ibex]

i cant

its already set to humanoid

[slender hare]

Can you click on "configure"?

[swift ibex]

yes

[slender hare]

Do that and send me a screenshot.

It will probably ask you to save.

[slender hare]

That is actually looking good.

[swift ibex]

yeah i didnt make it

i downloaded it

[slender hare]

Have you been in that menu already?

[swift ibex]

no

[slender hare]

Click on "done" and see if the bone error is still there.

Because that rig looks fine.

[swift ibex]

yeah its still there

[slender hare]

O_o But the bones its asking for are right there. Otherwise that puppet would show red parts.

[swift ibex]

it might be the animator im using?

[slender hare]

Might.

[slender hare]

The only difference I see in my animator box it says "cull update transforms" next to culling mode. But i have no idea what that does to be honest.

[swift ibex]

well when i select the select button it brings me to this menu

[slender hare]

That goes beyond my experience unfortunately. 😦

[swift ibex]

oof

[slender hare]

I've been mostly following tutorials so far. Thats why im confused that it would give you bone errors when the bone mapping shows all green.

[swift ibex]

ill have to start watching tutorials then

[slender hare]

Sorry I cant help more. Im still figuring all this stuff out myself. 😄

[swift ibex]

its fine

im doing this for the first time after all

[vast wyvern]

idk if this comes into avatar optimization or not, but i would like to ask to the ones that could know how to fix this messy Nanachi hair. i have tried a lot and i just keep breaking it little by little and i have spend 2 days trying to fix that old model :c

[calm spade]

What is it supposed to be ?

And how is it broken

[vast wyvern]

@calm spade it is a Nanachi hair, from the very old 2017-2018 model (not Lexicon V4), and as you can see it is just a mess of polygons, overlaped faces, vertex everywhere

it is a really messy avatar and i have so many feelings to it, that's why im trying to fix it u . u

[calm spade]

oh, looks like overlapping geometry

most likely two identical overlapping pieces

[vast wyvern]

@calm spade yeah, but as you can see in the first picture it is a full mess of polygons u w u, do you know how to fix it properly?

[calm spade]

try pressing L on one of the vertices and delete the selection

[vast wyvern]

doesn't do anything :c

[calm spade]

Can you show what's left after doing that ?

[vast wyvern]

do you have free time? im really noob so i think i could screenshare

[calm spade]

Not at the moment sorry, but basically you just have to find the copy of the mesh, and remove it

[worthy fjord]

how do u shrink an avatar from 100+ mb to just a few

is it prefab or something?

[calm spade]

Is it 100mb in vrchat or unity ?

[supple reef]

So there's really no way to have particle collision without the performance going up to Medium?

[runic ingot]

Anyone knows how to delete what I want to delete the area in Blender? I try to find some tutorial but no one teach that

[jovial grail]

look at how to select stuff

[amber hemlock]

Just so you know... that’s a hat. It’s a beast’s head and a mane, he’s wearing it as a hat.

[vast wyvern]

the thing is trying to discuss about something? xD
not everyone have seeing the anime, neither reading the manga nor watched the movie.
it is easier to explain to most of the people that "it is hair" to reference to it.
using for more than 2 years that old model and the amount of people referencing to it as hair agree with me.
but yeah, you are right, but aporting that kind of info doesn't help me trying to fix what im asking int his channel.

[amber hemlock]

Lol sorry

[worthy delta]

does anyone know what this means

[swift ibex]

you have to install the androidplayer plugin

you should be able to find it in buildsettings under edit

[worthy delta]

alr thanks

[worthy delta]

ok but like

im literally using the shaders in the mobile pack

someone please explain

[normal nova]

I think lightmapped might be the exception?

[worthy delta]

well either its the overall performance: very poor

or the lightmapped that wont let me publish it

[normal nova]

It's usually the shader, I think you can publish with very poor

[worthy delta]

soo

what do i do about the shader

[normal nova]

What're you trying to use it for? Like, unlit everything?

[worthy delta]

wait thats what lightmapped does

[normal nova]

From what I remember yeah

[worthy delta]

o h

[normal nova]

What're you trying to do?

[worthy delta]

just trying to make an avatar i made for pc work on my quest

[normal nova]

ah, just do Standard Lite or Diffuse then

[worthy delta]

alr thanks

[worthy delta]

ok now a bit more help

it says this

yet i dont know what to do abou tit

[normal nova]

Uhh, restart unity I think? I think I've seen that before but I can't remember what I did about it

[worthy delta]

ok

nope, didn't work

[normal nova]

hm

oh, apparently that occurs if something else earlier in the build failed. Is anything else wrong?

[worthy delta]

NOT REALLY

not really*

oops

this is the console after i restarted unity

and pressed build and publish

[calm spade]

Unpack the prefab and remove the scripts ?

[worthy delta]

uh

i dont understand that

nvm got it

[normal nova]

Yeah probably need to remove the missing script refences. If i had to guess, it's for dynamic bones

(which aren't on quest anyway)

[wooden glacier]

I know the standard most people use is .fbx but ive seen a few models as .avatar, is there a known way how to change the model from .fbx to .avatar?

[torpid lagoon]

how many meshes do you have?

if you don't know already, even if two meshes share the same material it still counts as two material slots instead of one

[jovial grail]

but if they share a material you might as well join the meshes

[amber hemlock]

Make sure you aren’t using “Keep Quads” in unity. This will double your material count.

It also doesn’t work, VRChat will triangulate anyway.

It’s ok to import quads, just don’t check “keep quads” when inspecting the fbx

If that’s not the issue, make sure the material count number in unity is not in bold (overwritten) - if it is, right click the bold number and pick revert

Bold values are set by unity and no not coming from the file

[agile hound]

wait wrong channel oops

[jovial grail]

right

[jovial grail]

merry christmas!

i don't think you can avoid that

each renderer will have at least one material

because keep in mind you're counting material slots not materials

[verbal surge]

How do I get rid of the free space in my atlas textures? (Repost due to image missing a layer)

[calm spade]

Manually move the UVs and textures

[verbal surge]

I'll try that, thanks 🙂

[floral mica]

is the new bake feature in cats still worse than doing it manually?

like does it still make you use 4k textures in unity or its blurry, cause i know the normal cats atlas did that

[torpid lagoon]

its always going to be worse than doing it manually, thats the tradeoff for automatic tools

im currently toying with it rn and having okay results, there's something up with my model that isn't playing nice with the decimation. im probably going to have to settle on poor (on quest) for now, just because going any lower than 10k makes the avatar unusuable right now

[floral mica]

does it do the thing cats atlas did where 70% of the atlas is just transparent?

[torpid lagoon]

yeah if you use the reprojection method

i created the uv myself using the smart uv function instead

for some reason cat's atlas function just has huge island margins

heres my result from the baking function though, left is about ~17k and the right is 9999 which is barely enough to get into the poor ranking on quest

i couldnt include the normal maps because the face got decimated so much it gave it more artifacts than it was helping anywhere else. there is a 0.25 ao applied though which works really well

also the shoelaces are supposed to be there, but i keep forgetting to fix the normals on them. the hair is also isn't subdivided on the quest version too, which shaves off like ~1k tris

[normal nova]

So unfortunately, when baking we have to rely on blender's built-in island packing, which considers all islands squares

If you buy UVPackMaster2 Pro though, the bake function utilizes it for super packed maps

like so

It's $30 tho

[torpid lagoon]

what other features does uvpackmaster2 have? i don't know how to optimize blender's built-in smart uv to increase the size of the face for example over everything else

because right now, the face is taking up so little uv space and the legs is like 30% of it lol

[normal nova]

Well, bake does that for you

[torpid lagoon]

it didn't have a (noticeable) effect for me unfortunately D: even when i made sure my bone was named correctly

but im also interested in doing it outside of cats too

[normal nova]

odd, probably another bug

As part of the script, it:

• averages all islands based on how large they are (blender function)
• selects all geometry belonging to the face/head/etc
• scales it up in UV space by whatever factor (which causes it to break away as new islands where neccesary)
• re-packs everything using Blender's built in UV pack function

then if uvp2 is installed, runs the pack function 10x

[torpid lagoon]

hmm it might be because my hair is also tied to the head vertex group, it might be eating up the space

i really have to look at the cats uv again to see though, right now im sticking to the uv i generated

i should probably get to filing all these small bugs i found through the github though 😄 theres just little things ive found

[normal nova]

quite possibly, my hair does that too

(which is still okay imo)

yeah, please do :3

[torpid lagoon]

and im looking at some of this stuff, i might be able to even write a couple of prs

[normal nova]

That would be a big help

[torpid lagoon]

one of the small ones is finding the head and eye bones, it's case sensitive for some reason

but its just like three functions, so i'll do it 😄

[normal nova]

oh

            if prioritize_face and "Head" in arm_copy.data.bones:
                selected_group_names = ["Head"]
                selected_group_names.extend([bone.name for bone in arm_copy.data.bones["Head"].children_recursive])

cough

[torpid lagoon]

even worse, its duplicated here:

                if armature is None or "Head" not in armature.data.bones:
                    row = col.row(align=True)
                    row.separator()
                    row.label(text=t('BakePanel.noheadfound'), icon="INFO")```

[normal nova]

never even crossed my mind x3

[torpid lagoon]

but theres already a function to check for head bones in common.py i think

[normal nova]

Well, that's expected

The UI matches the behaviour, which is a good thing, but both should be corrected :P

one thing, we sample normals 128x when doing world-bake, then when re-baking to tangent we also sample 128x, which causes veeery slight color variation vs just sampling 1x the second time

But when I switch the second sampling to 1x it's more prone to artifacts, so I think it'll have to stay as-is for now

[torpid lagoon]

ahh hmm

[normal nova]

may be an option later

I intend to add an 'option level' enum from basic to advanced that exposes all that stuff

[torpid lagoon]

oooh that would be very nice

by the way how can i add the addon to blender without causing a mess :-p i only worked with single file blender addons

i dont think i can point it to just the folder, i think i tried that already

nvm i can just symlink in there

[fleet wharf]

How do you guys are able to keep the file size under 10mb? On my project, the texture of my normal map is twice that size... am i missing something? I'm using .png but going to .jpeg totally destroy the quality because of the compression. And i can't go under 2k texture without everything looking super pixelized. How do you guys do?

[normal nova]

Stick with PNG, unity turns it to GPU textures when uploading

And... yeah, 1k textures are important for Quest

[torpid lagoon]

okay pr submitted 😄

[finite basin]

Guys, what’s the polygon limit for VRChat avatars? I’m seeing some say 10k, some 20k, and other people say as high as 80k. Is there any official consensus?

[heady smelt]

10k for Quest, 70k for PC

[next iris]

what's the easiest way to remove bones from a model?

[next iris]

thank you8

[finite basin]

Thanks @heady smelt

[plucky vapor]

Hey anyone who knows anything about avatar optimization for blender to make a avatar cross platform without breaking their face and eyes key maps thing

[jovial grail]

Try the new bake panel in CATS

It can generate a quest avatar

[buoyant holly]

https://github.com/GiveMeAllYourCats/cats-blender-plugin/wiki/Bake

[plucky vapor]

I already have cats

Only thing is idk how to use the bake thing I’m trying to find away not to break shape keys

[buoyant holly]

link I posted has documentation on how that works

[plucky vapor]

I have the plug-in for cats and ik what poly count I need rain it doing it is my issue every time I’ve done it the shape keys break

[plucky vapor]

Now I’m trying to figure out how to put the material on the fbx

[buoyant holly]

Are you using the baking function or the blender decimate

and there's a button in the baking panel for the quest polygone count

[normal nova]

@plucky vapor cats decimation preserves shape keys as of 0.18

[plucky vapor]

Last time I used decimation I failed to preserve shape keys because when the model was uploaded the lip sync was turned off

[normal nova]

Yes, now it has it

I just added that a month ago

[autumn nimbus]

help

[pearl ingot]

any reason an optimized avatar of mine, 3mb in size, takes insanely long to export into Unity as opposed to my 7mb avatar?

as well as taking up to 5-10 minutes just to apply the humanoid rig, applying materials, etc...

[jovial grail]

remove the vrm components from your avatar, maybe the autofix button can help?

[radiant shadow]

Eh theres alot of things wrong there, you converted a vroid in unity and its a mess after, always vroid>blender>unity , your pelvis is all sort of wrong

[mossy cedar]

i managed to upload the pc version of the avatar, i've switched build mode to android to upload it with the same avatar id now the upload thing won twork

it just gets stuck on that

then it goes back to normal and brings up the community labs screen

is it broken or something

[forest fable]

disable future proofing in settings

[mossy cedar]

now it's saying no android support

alr

i click build & publish for android and it just shows a loading bar and refreshes the SDK, i cant get it to be supported for android

[forest fable]

that just means the current avatar uploaded doesnt have an android version, as your upload failed

just republish it after disabling future proofing

[mossy cedar]

alr, i'll switch to windows, republish without future proofing, go back to android and upload with the same ID

[forest fable]

you dont need to republish for windows

[mossy cedar]

oh.

i've just deleted the normal one i uploaded to upload this one

aaaaaand it doesnt work

i give up

alright i've been trying this for an hour, i give up on this shit

what the FUCK

i uploaded it with android now it's saying it's not supported for quest

i'm done with this shit

fuck this

[heady smelt]

bruh, you gotta wait for the info to be updated in the editor. VRC isn't to be blamed, when you've uploaded the Quest version it may take a while.

and not to mention that their server was having problems today

[lapis parcel]

If an avatar I’m making has about 100k polygons, is that going to make me and other people lag out a lot?

[heady smelt]

not really but you will classified as a "very poor" performance avatar

[lapis parcel]

As long as the performance is still high then I should be okay

[calm spade]

yell, it's a lot for an avatar

[modest garnet]

Learn blender

VRoid's also an option

[desert halo]

@lapis parcel as long as you don't put an intentionally laggy shader on it there's no way it would lag anyone

[open mist]

Could someone send that rig hierarchy chart please

[jovial grail]

it's pinned in #avatar-rigging

[open mist]

oh

[coarse valley]

is there any way I can combine this material into a single large texture? As it stands now the whole thing is a single feather texture shared among the 22 feathers

[calm spade]

What would you need to combine ?

[coarse valley]

I want to display an animation across the whole tail, but i cant do that because this is the texture for the whole material

I was wondering if instead of a single small texture shared among the whole tail, it could be one large texture to make animating easier

I know thats the literal opposite of optimization but i wasnt sure if i should ask here or 3d modeling

[calm spade]

Can't you just duplicate the feather into your texture ?

[normal tangle]

Is there anyone here that could help me out with texture atlasing in blender? I have imported a character from vroid but something about the shader is causing the atlas to be black when baking and I can't figure it out.

[golden steppe]

So I was thinking to optimizing my avatar when I noticed that whenever I’m in Vrchat my avatar stands on the end of their toes, I thought maybe making them taller would fix it, however I’m not too sure if that would make it harder to optimize. Anyone who knows if that’s true or weather I should do that or not? Thanks.

[dreamy hearth]

My avatar says I have a whopping 86 material slots, but in actuality I have less. Why is this happening?

[amber hemlock]

Second UV layer, make camera flat front angle, project UV from view, then bake diffuse from first UV to the second UV. However, repeating the UV space like it currently is is far more optimized. So this process would be unoptimizing it.

[cursive elm]

question

how bad is it to have multiple bodies aka mesh renders

[solid smelt]

Multiple meshes means multiple draw calls. You should join meshes that do not need to be separate to avoid the draw calls

[cursive elm]

am asking how bad is it

its because of quest

if you wanna have animated texture you need to separate it in blender

[solid smelt]

Decently bad? Especially on quest. The details on performance ranking for VRC should give you a ballpark on what is expected for each platform. Optimization is usually death by a thousand cuts so one "bad" thing is hard to measure directly.

[cerulean holly]

@golden steppe You could un assign toe bones in Unity, it won't stand on its toes then

[golden steppe]

Ok thanks

[amber hemlock]

It makes a separate draw call. A draw call is scanning every pixel of the screen to paint something on it. When a model is all one mesh, it can do every material in a single pass. Otherwise it has to do multiple passes for a single frame... and you only have so much time to finish up the passes or the frame won’t be done in time and you get a dropped frame. Which lowers framerate.

This is especially bad in VR as vsych is always on - so if you miss a frame you are waiting around for the next one

Meaning you can be the cause of halving a framerate very easily

[golden steppe]

Yo I switched the lighting in unity for my avatar to toon lit and around the eyes and eyebrows there are these black squares! Any fix?

[amber hemlock]

It sounds like you need a shader that supports transparency

[livid storm]

Genuine question; a lot of game models when it comes down to hair normally have a ton of different materials which need to be layered in a specific order in a Fade style to look proper. Sometimes they're double sided, sometimes they're two different materials for each face.

Is it possible to optimize this without ruining the render order or cause Z-Fighting if you z-write? Or is this just something you can't optimize without losing out on hair quality? (Normally the alpha gets messed up leaving weird transparent parts or gaps)

[amber hemlock]

You could do it all on one material with custom masks and conditional z writes but the usual method is to separate single and double sided into separate materials, as well as those that need partial transparency and those that can be solid/cutout.

In general, any shader that draws partial transparency will not (and should not) z-write

Although if you want to do things like eyes in back of but drawn over top of hair you’ll want a shader that manually lets you control stencil layers

Ideally you want to Z write as much of your model as possible, since that lets everything else have correct depth information for drawing the transparent bits

[livid storm]

I did try combing the back faces together and front faces into two materials with z write intent originally but it caused some weird issues where the alpha should be rendering on top of what used to be other materials at certain angles

[amber hemlock]

When all else fails make sure all of your transparent bits are the same material, since most shaders will handle it all in one pass

Which means you won’t have issues like z fighting

If you have a model that needs both partial (blended) transparency that needs to be single sided and partial transparency that needs to be double sided ... consider using single sided for everything and duplicating and reversing the triangles where doublesided is needed in blender

That gets them to one material and will avoid alpha glitches

Then all the triangles that don’t need the transparency at all or can be cutout.. make a second material and use a cutout shader instead

Referencing the same texture

Sorry if I suck at explaining things but yeah you can avoid pretty much all alpha glitches, at least with yourself

[livid storm]

No problem, I appreciate the help. The model in question does need to use partial transparency for both the back and front faces since the developers decided to opt out of using a singular double sided material for two separate ones that handle the front and back respectively. The materials used to be all separate meshes which handled render order but since I combined them I've been trying to figure out workarounds to help with the render order as having...way more materials than I should kinda sucks.

I'll try out what you suggested

[golden steppe]

Thanks guys

[heady smelt]

Better than that would be 1x feather and 1x the hair strand and then just tile this texture.

[lilac zealot]

is it a good practice to disable and enable DB components with animations to only use those who are necessary?

[lilac zealot]

well it seems obvious so let me rephrase: I have an avatar with several outfits with their own skirt and bones, but it's too much work to weight all of the outfits individually into a common set of skirt bones, so is a good practice, as a workaround, to disable and enable individual DB components with toggle animations so this way people don't lag out?

[proper grail]

dynamic bones still do the lag when the mesh they affect is disabled yes

[jovial grail]

but if the components are disabled they shouldn't

[verbal surge]

Does it make any difference if the texture itself isn't quadratic? (e.g. 1024x2048)

[snow geode]

I don't think that matters at all

It shouldn't break anything, and it will save space

[upper yacht]

Unity will by default make all textures the nearest to the power of 2

And, as for mattering... It does, but, not a whooole lot.

[heady smelt]

Yes also it would eliminate the uncessary calculations of non-visible dynamic bones.

[heady smelt]

It should not as long as your UV map is correctly set.

[verbal surge]

ty

[heady smelt]

i mean think of it this way, when you generate an atlas texture, usually the UV maps are properly configured right? then why cant u do the same somehow?

[lilac zealot]

okay thanks!

[restive harbor]

I need something added to my avatar

And I don't know how to do it so can someone do it for me

[heady smelt]

yes sir, depends what you want to be added. DM me the details and I will see what I can do for you.

[coarse valley]

I have a few meshes that are layered exactly on top of each other (transparent stockings covering a leg) is there a way for me to give them priority or something? They randomly swap between which one is visible in unity

[heady smelt]

That is known as Z fighting @coarse valley

[sick timber]

Not really a solution other than making the stockings slightly bigger.

[heady smelt]

thats a plausible workaround or they can just draw the parts that overlaps onto the other texture

[runic ingot]

Can anyone teach me how to sculpt working in 2.9? I saw the tutorials but i click the left click it doesn't work

[coarse valley]

i thought Shrinkwrap Modifier was my savior but it just made it worse lol

[chrome stag]

any "optimization" tips? https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/491242345321201675/797013358037041172/VRChat_2021-01-08_08-51-32.mp4

[runic ingot]

Is that possible export prefab to fbx ,and blender can use? I search some tools but blender cannot open

[jovial grail]

shrinkwrap has a slider to add distance

[fringe wigeon]

why do i get this

[calm spade]

Because you use shaders with lots of keywords

[zenith plaza]

Would be different though if vrchat didn't force all the variants to compile

Well used keywords are great for better performance

Once poiyomi 7 goes public though there's gonna be virtually no keywords anymore because of the shader optimizer that's run before uploading

That generates a new optimized shader file based on the settings you have set on the material so keywords aren't needed for the final material anymore

[calm spade]

2019 🙏

[coarse valley]

yeah i fiddled with shrink wrap but it butchered weight painting. Ill just copy the body weight paints to the clothes

[proper grail]

Use both! Shrink wrap the clothes to the mesh and apply it as a shapekey. With the shrinkwrap shapekey active move the clothes verts around where youd like them to move with the mesh than data transfer! If the verts line up with the mesh use nearest vertex data otherwise use nearest face interp. Than delete the shrinkwrap shapekey. done!

[uncut apex]

How can I combine materials to make one? I am trying to optimize an avatar for quest but I have too many materials and it’s making it poor quality

[worthy otter]

you have to atlas the textures, you can use cats in blender to do it or you can do it manually

[solemn condor]

What has a larger negative impact on performance... fewer materials with very large textures or more materials with smaller textures? I have several parts with 4k textures. I can atlas them to reduce material slots but the atlases will use 8k textures then. (I know I could drop the resolution of the textures in Photoshop, but I'm interested in the answer to this question assuming no image downsizing)

[coarse valley]

more materials

texture size only impacts avatar size to download and how much vram the client computer needs

and memory bandwidth but i dont think anyone playing vrchat is gonna have that gimped by some wolfboy avatars

[runic ingot]

What if I don’t combine the materials? Because I can’t customize the shader 1 by 1

[coarse valley]

well if its just 1 avatar its not an issue. the problem is when multiple people have like 20 mats on them then it adds up to like 200 in a public world

and if youre using a shader like poiyomi then you can have the clothes, skin, and facial effects be their own atlas then use photshop to black out the parts of the textures you dont want affected by special effects

[runic ingot]

Thanks the info , sounds that combine the mats is a good choice for everyone in public world

[solemn condor]

You can use masks/maps to accomplish the same thing with atlased textures in a lot of cases. Poiyomi has Matcap 1 and Matcap 2, Specular 1 and Specular 2 for example. So you could create a simple black/white mask to apply Matcap 1 and Specular 1 to one of the atlased textures and Matcap 2 and Specular 2 to another.

[solemn condor]

Thanks 🙂

[runic ingot]

I would try this when I combine the mats

[runic ingot]

By the way ,where can i find my mats ? i combine the png but atlas doesn't create a mat ?

No mat i can't modify fbx shader

[languid quartz]

They should get embedded onto the avatar.

[runic ingot]

I go to find thanks

[languid quartz]

Also, In unity you should extract the materials.

[granite crypt]

So I'm kind of new to vrchat, how bad is it to use an avatar that is labeled "original: poor"?

[coarse valley]

not that bad

[tiny whale]

that moment when your avatar is like 10.5 MB and therefore unable to upload to quest...

[orchid pendant]

rip

[tiny whale]

i fixed it but i mean, come on

[heady talon]

Any idea how to reduce this number more? Been trying to solve this all day and I feel like my avatar is so bare bones now that theres nothing else I can merge or decimate. Should I just delete the face and put a mask on it or something?

[solemn condor]

Have you tried using the new smart decimate function in CATS on the entire avatar, with the target set to 10k tris? It does a surprisingly good job of preserving detail where needed for an automatic tool.

[heady talon]

I have yea. It ruins the face which is why im wondering if I should just delete the whole thing.

[sweet mason]

If you hit the 10 mb on a quest avatar. That bad news. The only reason you should come near is almost none

[normal nova]

@heady talon your hair looks super complex. Decimation works better for hair if you boolean union all of it together first

[buoyant holly]

is that because it removes all of the unneeded bits of hair at the intersections

[glad beacon]

would this be the right place for CATS questions?

if so, ive been having some issues with combining RGB materials into an atlas

combining them between objects doesnt work, but that may just be a limitation of the tool
I've tried merging the materials through combine similar and atlas on a single object, and it either removes all mats on the mesh or merges them all into one solid one

[heady smelt]

@glad beacon i can help u.

[glad beacon]

oh?

[heady talon]

Ill see if me changing the hair is going to help

[heady talon]

2 days and 1 night of continuous work and now its finally under 10 k. Gonna publish it and see what it looks like. Worst case scenario its ruined thanks to the amount of stuff its missing but ill figure that out at some point. 😄 I figured out how to save the face btw but if im ever going to get it to 5 k im going to cry. I have no idea how some people are able to make their mmd models to look good when mine looks so bare boned now and worst of all mine is on poor...

[heady smelt]

HELLO i need help with the avatar polygons in unity i want to reduce them in unity but i dont know how i tried many methods but im still stuck with this problem

[heady talon]

Use Blender?

[heady smelt]

ik but i already build my avatar in unity and i dont know how i can export it back to blender

[tardy moss]

you gotta remember quest is just a cellphone with a headset embedded, it's never gonna be able to look as good as in pc

[heady smelt]

ik

oh im sorry

[tardy moss]

(but yea it's true that some things can look surprisingly a lot better than you would expect)

[heady talon]

i am aware. it just makes no sense that others are able to make cool mmd avatars for quest even with the 10k poly count

[normal nova]

You really should aim for 5k-7.5k

So people can see you by default

[tiny whale]

does changing the mesh compression affect the overall appearance of an avatar? like, at all?

[proper grail]

Mesh compression deletes verts based on angle, it should not be used on skinned meshes at all

[heady talon]

Ill get there eventually. Currently its on 9305 so thats something. Its interesting how much ive learnt simply by being the messenger between two people.

[heady talon]

I assumed people can see you if your avatar is better than very poor? Is that not the case?

[normal nova]

Actually I can't remember which end of the range matters

[heady talon]

The sdk says that very poor avatars are blocked by default but the user is able to unblock them. It doesnt say anything about poor though.

[snow geode]

I believe it's only medium avatars and above that are shown

I think I read it in a doc

Plus it's the lowest you can go on pc too, (before users can auto hide with safety) so it makes sense.

[heady talon]

Well in that case I really need to figure out what to get rid of.

[snow geode]

Edge dissolve

Do you have a picture of that avatar in wireframe? Or with a wireframe overlay

[heady talon]

What part of it would you like to see?

[snow geode]

Just a picture from the front

[snow geode]

Oh no that's decimated

Can't dissolve uhh

[heady talon]

ye 🥴

Ill figure it out eventually

[snow geode]

You can try decimating it more?

[heady talon]

True

[snow geode]

Do you have the original model?

[heady talon]

But I dunno. Kinda at a point now that its only the joints and face that are not bare bones...

[snow geode]

If is the original not decimated like that

[heady talon]

I mean since its an mmd its not that difficult to remake. Sure about 3 days worth of work would go to waste but 🤷‍♀️

[snow geode]

If you had the original you could easily edge dissolve and have better looking results with more control

[heady talon]

Tell me more about this edge dissolve thing.

[snow geode]

You select an edge, press X and dissolve edges

[heady talon]

Im seriously just learning from bits and pieces of info that I hear as im a messenger between two people. Everything else is just trial and error.

[snow geode]

It like deletes it but keeps the uv map consistent

I'll show you

[heady talon]

What are the odds that this is literally what I was wondering how to do like 15 minutes ago when I saw I had some edges I didnt like but when deleting them it deletes the entire face.

[snow geode]

You select the edges, then just disolve them, it will kinda merge them into their neighbors

The texture will be unaffected, the shape will be almost the same

[heady talon]

Like this? Then I just need to move the remaining lines straight?

[snow geode]

Not gonna work with a model like that

[heady talon]

Why not? 🙃

[snow geode]

It will probably break

[heady talon]

In simplified English please

Ah

Break XD

So what makes you say that

[snow geode]

It's decimated like that, very unpredictable

Again it's best to dissolve the original

Or just accept the low ranking

[heady talon]

That means its a challenge that im going to overcome 🙃 Im most likely going to do what you told me to do but im not turning down this challenge that I now set myself. XD Gonna save this as the experimental version and redo everything I did so far.

[normal nova]

You can probably get away with auto-decimation if you're just trying to make a quest port. Perfect is the enemy of good, etc

[tropic narwhal]

How hard is it to optimize a pc avatar for quest usage?
I have no experience in 3D modeling software and I wanted to know if i would be able to follow a guide on it, or if I should find someone who has experience with avatars and ask them if they can do it

[heady talon]

I can tell you that ive spent a bit over 3 days so far on this and I have barely taken any breaks. Im literally doing this while listening to my school stuff in the background. 😛

Had a few headaches aswell so youre going to need a lot of thinking power XD

Since you mentioned that you have no experience on this id recommend first learning how to do stuff with the pc avatars and then after learning the basics you could try to do the quest thing but seriously the poly limit is killing me so if youre easily stressed DONT DO THIS.

[heady talon]

I mean its fine the way it is right now and im actually proud of myself for being able to make it poor from very poor but I kinda want to try to get it to medium just because. It already serves its purpose since I have some quest friends and finally theyre able to see me as me but I still want to push myself to try to do better.

[heady talon]

If I understood correct you want me to do this the upper left way instead of the lower right way. Wouldnt that still end up leaving more polygons than the way im doing it with the experimental version? I basically did the whole body with my way first and that got rid of around 300 polys so im wondering how the cleaner way is going to reduce them more. Do I decimate the upper left one after doing the edge dissolve to reduce the amount?

[runic ingot]

How can i improve my avatar bright?

can do it in blender?

[normal nova]

@heady talon basically, blenders decimate function does a selective edge collapse, so it'll pick the edges which affect the shape the least

So starting off with the original gives it more flexibility

[coarse valley]

is there a faster way for me to combine faces like these as a batch instead of manually going through all of them and pressing F?

[calm spade]

Tris to Quads

[coarse valley]

thx

[snow geode]

Edge dissolve as much as possible, try dissolving the knees and elbows a bit, 3 loops is like the minimum for a decent bend, dissolve areas that don't bend or give needed roundness to the model. You probably have a lot of edges you can dissolve on the head, so do that too, try dissolving even more of the back and sides of the head since you stare at people's faces, not the back of their head that's hidden underneath hair. You should be able to dissolve your way down to 7.5k, the minimum auto shown rank or more without needing decimation

[boreal escarp]

If i found a model ingame and saved it but i want to do some optimizations to it. is there any way to take it out of the game into an obj or some other type of file to work on it?

[languid quartz]

Other than asking the creator of it for the files, No. At least not without breaking ToS

[boreal escarp]

i thought as much dang. thanks for the response though!

is there a way to find the original creator just from the model info

[languid quartz]

There should be a option to show avatar author but this is only visible if you click on somebody else who is using the avatar

If you're using the avatar there is no option to show this iirc

[runic ingot]

What if I change the scene ‘s lighting of blender and export Fbx in unity ? Would more bright ?

[uncut apex]

im trying to upload a quest avatar, but when i open it in vrchat, its crushed into the ground. This has happened to 2 different avatars ive tried to upload. Any solutions?

[jovial grail]

no, it's all unity

[runic ingot]

except shader , change the scene environment lighting would effective in VRC?

[jovial grail]

light depends on the world

so it's only shader settings that can change how bright it is

there's a few other things that can cause it to look wrong like bad normals, but I don't know much about that

[runic ingot]

Enough , I give up some world cuz i can't do the mask to add the shader makes avatar always have light

[jovial grail]

you should ask in the discord of the shader

[nova hornet]

Hey how do I give a model it's emission texture in blender? I want to bake it while keeping emissions

[calm spade]

Drop the emission texture in the emission slot

oh in blender

You'd have to create a texture node and plug it into emission

[nova hornet]

Alright I'm gonna hope it's simple enough I can just figure it out even though I've barely messed with nodes

Thanks

Think I found a simpler option

Use Principled BSDF

[calm spade]

that's the default shader yeah

[nova hornet]

I feel I can see why, it seems like a good shader

[analog seal]

First time using CATS plugin, Texture Atlas isn't going so well... combines my 8 materials down to one but doesn't appear to be wrapped properly:

If I click "Save Atlas to.." that's what it immediately does.

[calm spade]

check your uvs before hand

[analog seal]

Unfortunately I'm a total Blender newbie. I know there is a UV Editing tab, but unsure what I'm checking for in Blender?

I appear to have UVs

[analog seal]

I think I know the actual issue... when I click "Save Atlas to.." it doesn't give me a save dialog. It should do that right?

[heady smelt]

Does anyone have any male hair for avatar?

[nova hornet]

@heady smelt wrong channel

[heady smelt]

Which channel then

[nova hornet]

I'd go with any of the ones under general

Is it possible to use Nara's Dynamic bone tool with avatar 3 avatars?

Also yeah OhGeezCmon it should give a save dialog

[calm spade]

Once you've chosen the path to the save it shouldn't ask you again i think

[nova hornet]

It asks me every time

[analog seal]

Yeah I think it's broken in 2.83+ or something

I'm actually in the process of manually atlassing right now

This is a fun lesson, and slow as hell! 🙂

@nova hornet What version of blender + CATS are you using?

[fiery mural]

I'm having the same issue; I'm new to this too

[analog seal]

@fiery mural Trying to follow this tutorial but it's going slowly... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH7Xdol5erw

Having issues

[analog seal]

Figured it out!

Only for 1 Atlas texture... gonna try 2 Atlas textures next

[analog seal]

Figured out 2 textures... I can help you out if you need it

[nova hornet]

I'm using 2.91

although I don't really atlas anymore I just bake stuff

[covert gulch]

I'd love the solution you found, because I'm using newest version of Blender as well and it wouldn't show me the save Atlas dialogue even once.

[analog seal]

@covert gulch same boat, I never was able to figure out the issue, I suspect that material add-on for CATS is broken in 2.8 and up but my model was a gltf format so only 2.8+ can import.

I ended up doing it manually and got the results that I needed.

Use that video above as a tutorial and it'll work. In my case I only had one object (I'd already combined the meshes) but the approach is the same.

Let me know if you have specific issues and I can try and walk you through them

I was able to rebake both diffuse (albedo) and normal map textures, and got my 8 material slots down to 2

[covert gulch]

Thank you!

[mystic creek]

Hey guys. I am trying to make a custom avatar which I intend to use on my Oculus Quest 2. (Don’t worry, I already know how to get the avatar from my PC to my Quest 2) this is my first time making an avatar though. I am using a software called Vroid studio to make the avatar cuz I dont know how to use blender. But I was just wanting to ask, can anyone tell me any ways that I can optimise the avatar to perform “decently” on the the quest 2?

[analog seal]

@mystic creek 1. If you model has multiple meshes, reduce them down to 1 mesh. 2. Decimate that mesh so it has less than 10,000 triangles for Quest (30k for PC). 3. Atlas all of your textures into one texture, re-wrap UVs and rebake textures. Reduce materials to less than 4 (1 ideally if you're using 1 Atlas). 4. Learn how to do all of this stuff in Blender, the CATS plugin makes it very easy. YouTube tutorials is your friend

[mystic creek]

Thank you

[analog seal]

Sure thing! I linked a YouTube video above on how to Atlas a texture + rewrap and rebake textures. Make sure to bake Diffuse in one go, then in the second go do Normal map (if you want it to have depth to the textures)

[nova hornet]

I can try sure

@minor thunder

Anyhow
I'm trying to optimize an older avatar in blender and whenever I hit bake after a few seconds it just crashes, any ideas?

[minor thunder]

Im sorry I dont know jack shit about optimizing and already got someone to do it. Thanks anyway!

[nova hornet]

It's fine, glad you got it optimized!

[half locust]

Hey, possibly silly question. The sdk mentions to combine multiple skinned mesh renderers for performance, but I'm not finding any resources that explain that process. They are all the same material so thats not an issue. Can someone point me to some documetation that explains how to do this?

[nova hornet]

CATS -> Merge Meshes

[half locust]

Is there a way to do it in unity?

[nova hornet]

Not afaik

[half locust]

alright, thanks

[nova hornet]

Also since most of the time when I see separate meshes it's for togglable stuff
If you don't know how to toggle stuff if it's all one mesh
you can do so in 3.0 via blendshapes or depending on what it is material changes!

[half locust]

yeah, I bought a package and its for different clothes/outfits. It currently works but I wanted to increase the performace rating by combining meshes. Thanks for your help

[sweet mason]

Only real reason to have a poor rating avatar would because of particle, dynamic bone etc. If set poor and up not be display. Your avatar can still be seen. The game is pretty generous of how much material /skin/mesh/bone you can have to be rated medium.

[hasty sinew]

ih

||hoe||

[silent steeple]

I published a model and it has like white shading on it how do i fix it

[languid sluice]

i am so lost

[jovial grail]

click the fbx you imported and in the inspector > materials > extract

or just create new materials and drag them on

[nimble ingot]

Hey, do rotation constraints contribute to lag, and if so, how badly? I wanna do an animation where I scale my avatars hands up for a giant punch, but you can't scale humanoid bones, as far as I'm aware. I could make a fake hand skeleton, assign that to humanoid rig and instead have rotation constraints for each bone, but that would be at least 30 for both hands and each knuckle. I figured I should ask here before going through all that effort

[upper yacht]

Every constraint, adds 3 transform rotation get (per source), 3 transform rotation set (one per axis) every update and before any gets or sets to see if it's frozen. Which means every constraint has 3 gets (per source), 3 sets, 4 ifs. And then you have multiple arithmetic functions to get the correct interpolation. And... for a...

TL;DR: They do contribute to lag, but, very little. They're not even measurable normally in Unity's profiler unless you do something extreme. Since they're under the minimum threshold due to being a very light weighted system. And the fact that they're in the jobs system, which means they're multithreaded, it's great. But, like anything else "Don't overdo it"

[heady smelt]

don't make 300 constraints basically

[upper yacht]

300 would be a lot, but, it was more like. Maybe have a max of 40 on your avatar.

[nimble ingot]

Hm, so, in practical terms, the hand mirroring constraints are realistic enough an option if I have no other choices then? I mean, I'd prefer not to have this kinda complexity in the use case, but if It's my only option, I may explore it.

Thanks for the insight.

[upper yacht]

It's very doable. Just, exclude everything non-essential from the dummybones

As in, like, if you don't need to scale the chest, don't have a dummy bone. etc, unless you want that kind of design.

[forest fable]

why not scale up your hands with a blendshape instead? no idea how well it would deform with bone movements with the shapekey active though

[nimble ingot]

Yeah, I only duplicated the hands and fingers, tested it in-game and it feels indistinguishable from just regular finger tracking.

Also, I tried blendshapes first, but those don't scale bones, only the mesh. So it was fine when my hands were open, but any finger flexing turned them into spaghetti

[vast wyvern]

can someone help me about why when i do atlasing some textures just turn white? (atlasing with cats)

[heady smelt]

same

[vast wyvern]

; w ; i keep needing some help with this u w u

[grave bloom]

I require assistance.
I'm trying to upload an avatar for quest, it's fairly balanced, doesn't have many assets, etc. It says it's 54MB.. I don't know what to do. I've tried re-modeling the avatar in blender, but that didn't help. Could someone give me some tips on how to optimize this?

[cerulean estuary]

Avatar size almost completely comes down to textures most of the time. Try reducing the resolution on your textures. If you have more than one material, atlasing will help reduce size as well. Could also be sound clips

Another thing is Crunch Compression. However that only affects download size and not rendered size (fast downloads, but still eats memory/vram)

[calm spade]

Make sure you enable legacy blendshape

your sdk is most likely too old and doesn't tell you about it

[vast wyvern]

@calm spade do you know how to do atlasing? :c

manual one*

[calm spade]

You create an image, add your textures on it, then you merge your materials and move the UVs around

plenty video tutorials on youtube

[vast wyvern]

i don't know why i can't get it done, im doing something wrong, and tupper one is too old and in the beginning when he ask to enable the uv stuff on addons doesn't work, i have tried with another 2 videos and i can't idk why TT.TT

[calm spade]

there's a lot more recent ones than tupper's

[candid onyx]

Can someone help me with an issue im having? Im trying to optimize this model, it is made of six different meshes and obviously doesnt need to be... So i use CATS and try to just click the "fix model button" and...

this happens....

the origin is also in the center when it should be in the feet, i know that one.

[steady grove]

@candid onyx personally, I would just conjoin the meshes manually; you can do this by selecting all the meshes you want to join (with the mesh you desire to be a parent last), and then press CTRL + J.

[candid onyx]

Then i get material issues.

[steady grove]

However, before doing so I advise checking to make sure that all UV Maps are named the same

[candid onyx]

yeah thats the problem...

[steady grove]

Then before conjoining, rename them all to the same thing

[candid onyx]

oh that fixed the texture issues.

thanks

[steady grove]

np

[pearl spade]

Ah hello, I assume this is the right place for this sort of help?

So recently obtained a model from a modeler, it came out great but there is a mystery we cannot seem to solve. There is some sort of line/gap in the hair that can be seen at a certain angle (Easier to see at further distances)

Anyone have any ideas of what could be causing this? Modeler is unsure of what is causing this either. They checked UV maps and other stuff but they are also stumped. (Unless they overlooked something!)

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/772935990141911060/793741764271800360/unknown.png

(In VR chat - looking at mirror. )

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/772935990141911060/796545289267576832/unknown.png

(up close)

Other things to note: Apparently this effect shows up in blender but it's a lot more subtle.

It seems like this effect is more agitated in Unity/Vrchat specifically.

Things the modeler checked:
UV mapping appears to be fine on their end.

Overlaping vertices? They also checked that however it looks fine. Nothing seems to be overlapping

Entirely unsure what seems to causing this. Otherwise the avatar is 100% functional and lovely but this one thing is a mystery that we are stumped on. Any ideas or what exactly could this mean or something that is overlooked? They mentioned nothing about that particular area looks odd.

It's a super perplexing mystery. Any advice/help would be much appreciated!

[sweet mason]

vertex not merge and you have a gap or your texture don't have enough margin

having the aniso level more then 4 on your texture help on stiff angle

[pearl spade]

Don't have enough margin? For reference a screenshot of the vertex of that area

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/772935990141911060/800907520755105822/unknown.png

[sweet mason]

check the uv

[pearl spade]

They mentioned they checked the UV and can't really find anything off https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/772935990141911060/796543740831203328/unknown.png

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/772935990141911060/796542053860245514/unknown.png

[sweet mason]

what about the front part of the hair

below the top part

that part look fine but the corner is kind of too near a skin island

the issue is probably on that part

you usually want a good amount of bleeding around your island

[pearl spade]

I sees! I'll pass the info along and see what they say

[arctic flame]

To how much should I set my Bone Reduction? :<

[wet schooner]

@ruby isle any tips on compensating for the lack of transparency on quest?

[ruby isle]

Depends on how your texture looks

Most of the time you can just take the transparent texture and combine it onto the flat texture in paint.net or photoshop

[wet schooner]

The transparent material is only for a small part of the model, but it kind of happens to occlude all the facial features..

[ruby isle]

Is it the facial expressions that typical anime characters have?

[wet schooner]

worse, it's a glass visor

oh cool the blink blend-shape is enough to get the eyes to disappear completely

if I go over 100

[ruby isle]

VRChat doesn't take over 100 values for blendshapes

[wet schooner]

oof

ok, hm

[ruby isle]

But if you use Blink + Blink Happy (Assuming you have that as a seperate one like most models do) that might work

[wet schooner]

Will VRC not accept that value if set through an animation?

[ruby isle]

Nope. VRC clamps blendshapes to 100 max

[wet schooner]

unfortunate

[ruby isle]

But yeah a visor might be pretty hard on Quest

If you even care about Quest anyways

[wet schooner]

I'd like to support Quest

Since I see a decent number of quest users who can't see my avatar cuz not compiled for quest

[ruby isle]

Well you might have to ditch the visor on the quest version

[wet schooner]

That's gonna be.. interesting, to say the least

[ruby isle]

The quest version doesn't have to be identical to the PC version. You can delete stuff and it still would work fine

As long as the armature is the exact same between versions

[wet schooner]

Only issue with using the blink blend shape for what I'm doing is that the automatic blink might interfere

Might need to override the additive layer

[ruby isle]

You really should create your own blendshape for it

[wet schooner]

also this is why removing the visor probably isn't the best solution

cuz the visor glass covers most of the face

[ruby isle]

Oh that could probably be changed to a solid texture

If the eyes are under the visor then you could just go into blender and delete the glass part

It won't make a big difference

[wet schooner]

Yeah the eyes and all that are beneath the glass

the glass goes a decent depth so it'd look pretty weird but I mean, without transparency its not like I've got many options

[ruby isle]

Without changing major geometry there's not much you can do

I'd recommend just removing the glass

[wet schooner]

Yeah, other solutions would involve a lot of texture editing

But that's a problem for later

the problem for now is dealing with the eye meshes

And I've come up with a decent solution of just using a blend shape that slips them beneath the back surface

[ruby isle]

That's the right way to do it

[wet schooner]

Well, time to test in game

hopefully the merging meshes didn't break everything horrendously

But idk how feasible it will be to get this working on quest

Considering it's currently using 4 mat slots (3 if no glass), and also it's 57k polys

okay in my attempt to optimize I broke a couple things

[wet schooner]

Everything seems to be playing nice, which is good

Trying to get under that poly count for quest is gonna probs be the hardest part

I'll have to rebake everything with the decimated model

[ruby isle]

Yeah quest optimization is a lot of work

Especially if you want it to look good

[wet schooner]

and you're supposed to use 1k textures too, aren't you?

[ruby isle]

It's preferred

Try to use as little of resources as possible

I believe my Quest avatar is a 2k crunched atlas

1k actually*

Mine is less than 1mb as well in download size

Remember that quest is essentially a smartphone so it has very little RAM to work with

[wet schooner]

Yeah it's less powerful than my phone iirc

which I suppose makes sense when my phone costs 3x the quest lol

trying to send an image of the baked mesh maps but discord angy about the image

Does.. does it think the image is NSFW?

[ruby isle]

Is it too large?

[wet schooner]

I have nitro, so I doubt that

that one worked

discord be weird

actually wow it's about 6300 tris

substance painter is a godsend

[wet schooner]

Suddenly its nearly 6am

Time to stop and sleep

[wet schooner]

Depends on how custom you want it to be. You can download free models and modify textures, or you could learn to sculpt and rig your own models. This is a model I purchased and I've done some optimizations to.

You can compliment Lux for the super high detail original sculpt. Though the latest image I sent isnt high poly at all, in fact it's about 12% the poly count of the low poly version i use on PC and probably like.. 1% of the full poly model. It has false detail from mesh map baking.

There's a variety of tools, some free and others not

Blender is free and good for modeling and rigging

It takes more than that. You've gotta make sure it has a proper rig, and then the model has to be imported to unity and configure it for VRChat

Also textures

Textures can be tough depending on the complexity of the avatar and the program you use to make them.

https://docs.vrchat.com

The VRChat documentation can answer most VRChat related questions, and you can find plenty of tutorials for making avatars on YouTube. Just make sure they're for Avatar 3.0 since it's not preferable to make new content with SDK2

[heady smelt]

Switching to Android:AndroidPlayer is disabled

Howdo i fix

[jovial grail]

you need to install the android module thing into unity

i think you can do that in unity hub

[heady smelt]

Whats it called @jovial grail

[jovial grail]

https://puu.sh/H8uOl/903a1979a2.png

add modules > android build support

[heady smelt]

Ty

[wet schooner]

Also probably best practice to do your Quest avatars in a separate project

[uncut bear]

im destroying edge lopps

and this crap come up on the skin

should I be worried